2010 Speakers

Sami Viitanen

Sami works at Forum Nokia as a technical consultant. Currently his main tasks are around technical evangelism related to Nokia’s key developer offerings of technologies like Qt and Web Runtime, and technical support for Forum Nokia developer partners. Previously Sami has worked in the consultancy team of Digia, providing technical training and consulting for the Symbian OS projects worldwide. He’s working history also includes experience in acting as an entrepreneur and partner, as well as working in globally operating mobile companies in various positions.

Jürgen Scheible

Jürgen Scheible is a researcher, musician and media artist. He is a doctoral student at the Media department of Aalto University, School of Art and Design in Helsinki where he runs the Mobile Hub, a prototype development lab for mobile applications with a strong focus on artistic approaches and creative design. His research focuses on designing multi-modal user interfaces for creating and sharing interactive artistic experiences. He has previously worked for 8 years at Nokia and in 2006 he was as a visiting scientist at MIT. He is the recipient of the Best Arts Paper Award in ACM Multimedia 2005 in Singapore, and ACM Computers in Entertainment Scholarship Award in 2006. In 2006, 2007 and 2008 Jürgen was recognized as a Forum Nokia Champion for his driving vision to be a bridge builder between art, engineering and research. He is the author of the book ‘Mobile Python – Rapid prototyping of Applications on the Mobile Platform’ (Wiley, 2007). He has been giving innovation workshops on rapid mobile application prototyping in academic and professional settings e.g. at Stanford University, MIT, NTU Taiwan, Yahoo Research Berkeley and Nokia.

Vesa-Matti Paananen

Vesa-Matti “Vesku” Paananen is the mobile business group lead and responsible for Windows® phones business in the Consumer & Online division of Microsoft in Finland. He also drives the Windows Marketplace for Mobile application store in thirteen Western European countries. Before joining Microsoft Mr. Paananen has been part of the founding teams of a number of International and Finnish Internet and mobile start-ups. In 2000 he founded Mobile Monday, the open global mobile society now active in over 30 countries. In 2004 Mr. Paananen was honoured as ‘the Father of the Ringtones Business’ when he received the Special Recognition Award of Mobile Entertainment Forum for his contribution to developing the commercial ringtones business in 1997

Göran AP Eriksson

Göran AP Eriksson is an Ericsson Research expert on mobile communication services, old and new. He has been in the mobile industry for more than 15 years in different positions, the last 10 in the research organization. He is a technical leader for Ericsson Research work with HTML5 technologies and social networking, which among other things. The last three years focus has been on using HTML5 browsers on open OS like Android and Moblin for bringing VOIP and Social Media to device screens.

Panellists

Paul Houghton

Paul is a mobile systems architect consulting with several of Futurice Ltd‘s customers from the OEM business unit. He is currently driving rapid development in mobile Java and Android platforms. His interests include designs which adapt to multiple target platforms, high performance asynchronous message passing, mobile media and UX. Recent projects for European and the US customers keep Paul in touch with industry reality and how that varies by location, platform and viewer expectation. Paul has a diverse business and technical background including work in mobile operator, OEM, engineering and business analysis. He is co-founder of several technology-based firms.

Juha “Sumppi” Kaunisto

Sumppi is the co-founder of 2General Ltd, a consulting company specializing in startup service development. During the fifteen years of making the Internet a better place Sumppi has acquired a unique perspective on all parts of the process, from code to layout and beyond. At the moment he focuses on concept design, user experience design and client side development. On the mobile side of things Sumppi has designed and implemented the Eat.fi mobile site. The site innovatively also serves as the base for the iPhone application and S60 WRT widget. Furthermore, Sumppi almost had a WAP startup in 2000, just when the dotcom bubble burst, so the startup never got off the ground. Then again, neither did WAP.

Teemu Kurppa

Teemu Kurppa is a co-founder of Huikea Experience, a startup focusing on social mobile games and related technologies. Huikea just released their first game Facetap – a fun casual game about your Facebook friends. With experience from both small startups and industry giants like Nokia and Google, Teemu has been developing mobile applications for 8 years. He was part of the founding team of Jaiku, a microblogging service that was sold to Google in 2007. User interaction – both design and development – excites him most. He feels that while on backend side of the service development, tools and practices have developed fast, developing compelling, easy to use user interfaces takes a major portion of the development time and needs much better tools. This is one area that Huikea is focusing on.

Lauri Piispanen

Lauri Piispanen is a lead software architect at Conmio Ltd, a company that enables their customers to achieve their mobile strategy. His team has delivered solutions to such high-profile clients as The New York Times, NPR, MTV3, dna, Blyk. Lauri engages daily with Conmio’s clients to distil requirements and wishes into workable solutions and recommendations that have since turned into common best practices throughout the mobile web. Pushing the envelope and venturing boldly into areas where no company has dared yet to go, Lauri and his team have been forced to act creatively and amass a bewildering spectrum of knowledge of the whole mobile web as a delivery channel: be it from recommended video codecs to “which browsers support div floats?” – and most importantly “how do we get around it?”.

Peter Vesterbacka

Peter is the founder of Some Bazaar, a new approach to building and growing new businesses. Prior to this Peter worked for HP in several communications industry related roles. While at HP Peter founded the HP Mobile E-Services Bazaar, a global innovation & corporate partnership program that BoozAllenHamilton declared an industry benchmark. Peter is also co-founder and the original initiator of MobileMonday.

Miika Virtanen

Miika is the Lead Technology Engineer at Rovio Mobile Ltd, a Finnish game development company specialized in mobile gaming. He’s responsible for the development of Rovio’s cross platform technology and works continuously with device manufactures and IHVs to make the mobile ecosystem a better place for gamers and developers. Recently he has been most active with Nokia’s native platforms and graphics acceleration. In the past he has also worked in various lead and supporting roles in game projects, totaling up to hundreds of millions of shipped copies